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RECIPES
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FE ATURES
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EVENTS
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GOOD NEIGHBOR
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fter graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1993, Scott Caradine and two of his friends looked around and noticed that Oxford was missing the exact thing that the three hungry college students craved. There was nowhere to grab pizza by the slice while enjoying a beer and listening to live music. In fact, while there was live music in Oxford, no one in the South was offering pizza by the slice or an interesting beer selection at that time, according to Caradine. The concept behind Proud Larry’s was born. Nearly three decades later, Caradine, who now owns the business with his wife Lisa, has persevered through 29 years of school breaks, along with an incredible influx of restaurants to the city (100 and counting), to be one of the longest-running establishments in Oxford. And he didn’t get there simply by loving pizza.
Q: What steps did you take in the beginning
Proud Owner PROUD LARRY’S OWNER SCOTT CARADINE REFLECTS ON HOW HE’S KEPT T H E B U S I N E S S G R OW I N G A N D T H R I V I N G F O R N E A R LY 3 0 Y E A R S . WRITTEN BY LIZ BARRET T FOSTER
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PHOTOGRAPHED BY JOE WORTHEM
to make sure Proud Larry’s would survive Ole Miss school breaks? A: I’m not real sure how we made it, to be honest. Summer in Oxford and Ole Miss was much different in the early to mid-’90s, and even early 2000s, than it is now. You just had to plan for it. In the early years, the sales used to drop 25% when college was out for the summer. You had to be really disciplined. (I was terrible at this, but we somehow made it!) You had to know that when business was flourishing in the fall and the spring, you had to store away and plan for the summer. Oxford is such a cyclical business, as most college towns are. But Oxford really
